Goddess Elayn better offer up her best aid because if there was ever a young woman to force her way under Matthias's tightly-woven skin, it would be Abel Venande of Eilibir.

Her heavy auburn hair had come undone, half-falling around her face as she swung at him with a pointed glare. A broken twig was even stuck in one of her tangled curls like a haphazard thought. It was difficult to contain his chuckle—well, more accurately, a snort because Skies only knew when Matthias had last laughed—but it was a short-lived amusement when he saw the angry red stains gathering over Abel's round cheeks.

Here she goes.

He stood still, arms strapped stoically to his sides, and watched the shock of emotions play about her features.

If she had been a pureblooded elf, she would have been much more adept at disguising them.

"Your mother?" Her tawny colored eyes were bright, the specks of gold in them sparking. "You have a mother?"

"I was hardly hatched."

Apparently, it had been the wrong thing to say. Abel's gaze flashed as Nairol, the cocky, young bastard of Queen Branwyn's latest litter, chuckled. That rid Abel of her last reserve of patience, not that Matthias could fully blame her. There was something quite offensive about the sound. She growled low in her throat, a threatening sound that built into a scream.

"This blasted pebble didn't even work!"

Matthias only had a split second to register the swift, fresh scent of soil before something small and hard smacked into his chest like a green bullet from Earth's sling-shot.

Curse the Scribes, she was quick!

He glanced at the emerald stone and reached for the arm in which it had once been sewn. "You are angry because of the malachite?" His boot nudged it before he directed its threads to his palm. It still amazed him that Earth responded after all this time. Feebler than before the Purge, but regardless--"I thought you understood it would not work against its Elvish kin."

"How would I have possibly known that?"

She strode to him before Araric or Nairol—though he doubted Nairol would have done anything more than hope she would stab Matthias—could stop her. Along the way, she snatched an arrow from the satchel across her back. The tip of it pressed into the hollow of Matthias's throat.

"The threads are part of your blood." Behind his back, his free hand gripped the pommel of his sword. After all, he had never had the opportunity to be trained in the art of Earthen battle techniques. "It speaks to you."

"Quit your fancy thou-art-holier-than-I bullshit," Abel seethed, her hand steady on her weapon. "You lied to me."

He met her fury with steadiness. "As I've told you before, the Elvish Folk cannot lie."

"See?" She shoved a finger into his chest, directly next to the spearhead of the arrow. "That! I came to you. For help. And you never told me you were just like me!"

"Not just like you," he corrected and then moved swifter than he had in close to two decades.

She gasped when he spun, snatching the arrow from her grasp and then using its leverage to flip her around. Her spine flattened against his chest with a hard thump. It all happened so fast that not even Matthias had a breath to marvel at what he had just accomplished.

"And I didn't lie," he said next to the tip of her pointed ear. Shaped exactly like his own. "I just never told you."

She howled then, pure fury, and threw her head back against him. Curse her height! The back of her skull connected directly with the bridge of his nose, a savage crunch signaling she had surely broken at least one bone in his face. Black stardust erupted across his vision, but he managed to hold onto one of her arms even as she wrenched free from his full-body bind. It was the shocking pain that caused him to fumble. Only his training kept him upright, had him dodging the punch she aimed at his jaw, ducking beneath it and twisting her other arm behind her back.

A shocked cry escaped her as Matthias forced the socket of her shoulder into an uncomfortable position.

"You are acting a fool," he told her. Blood dribbled past his lips and onto his tongue. The metallic taste of it cleared away the last of the dizzying stars. "Stop this."

Her teeth gritted against the pain. "Takes one to know one, captain."

The earth beneath him trembled, its threads crawling upwards from the soil. "Shit."

Before he could take a single step back, something thick and rough wrapped around his ankle and yanked. Matthias fell, his palms smacking into the ground to protect his already bruised face from another beating. He twisted his torso and only had a moment to glance at the Willow's gnarly root that had torn its way from the ground before a sharp point tipped under his chin.

"What have you done with Sebastian?" Abel demanded.

"Nothing." 

The girl had somehow nicked his very own sword! Traitor. Matthias glowered at it though he knew any attempts of hers to actually use it against him would be futile. 

"I am on your side, dammit."

"And what of them?"

Matthias tried to shake his captured ankle, but the root held fast. Cheers, mother. I've missed you, too. After all, not even a full-blooded Elvish Elder could use Earth's threads against the Willow without her allowing it. Eleanora most likely adored the fact that a half-mortal girl had taken down her son. Relished in it, even.

Nairol sure did. Matthias was almost positive he heard the bastard chuckling again.

He looked back at Abel. "Their feelings on the matter are...complicated."

"Complicated how?" 

It was Araric who explained, his tone gruff. "The creation of Authors was an abomination to the elements. They were, and remain, Queen Branwyn's greatest regret."

Abel's knuckles whitened along the hilt. His blade held true at his throat, but Matthias realized her blood marred it. She must have cut herself when she snatched it off him. Unsurprisingly, she paid little notice to the wound. What was surprising was the fact his blade—his blood-blade—hardly reacted to her blood.

As if it were his own.

Abel jutted her own chin towards the two elves behind her. "Araric all but claimed this tree would murder anyone with Author blood."

"The Willow would not." Matthias pushed himself up as the root relaxed a smidgen, mindful of the sword's proximity to his jugular. Abel would be just crazy enough to slash him simply to prove she could. It wouldn't end well for her. "Once, it may have, but not any longer. Sebastian would be safe from her branches."

"And you're so certain of this?"

"Of course." He reached out a swift hand and grasped the blade of his sword, testing her. Testing it. His blood-blade. He felt its sharpened edges cut into his palm, tasting his blood. "The Willow is my mother."

In any other circumstance, it would have been comical the way her lips soundlessly mouthed the words back to him, the bewildered shock that flickered across her lightly freckled face, rouging her cheekbones. But there was nothing humorous about the way she dropped his sword in surprise. His blood-blade followed the path of her wrist and sliced into the meaty muscle of Matthias's thigh. It tore through the thick material of his breeches as if it were butter.

Matthias hissed and swore. Not because of the wound's pain but because Abel had no idea what she had just done.

For she had just used a blood-blade against its owner.

"Dammit." Abel dropped the blade. "Matthias. I'm sorry. I didn't—"

Sensing the threat, Eleanora's root released him. He shot to his feet before Abel could finish her apology. He kicked the blood-blade halfway across the Willow's clearing before he collided with Abel. Their long, graceful limbs tangled together as Matthias tackled her to the ground like it would somehow protect her from the blade's wrath. His arm circled around her waist. He fell against her heavily, her breath whooshing from her lungs and snapping at his face.

She gaped up at him, pushing at his biceps. "Are you insane?!"

Matthias knew his eyes were half-wild as he raked them over her unharmed body. His left hand already reached for her thigh. She kicked at his wandering hand. "What are you doing?"

"Don't move." His free hand gasped her face, holding it steady. "Are you okay?"

"You mean besides the gigantic buffoon crushing and bleeding all over me?"

Her pants were not torn. Not a stitch out of place in the spot that would mirror his own damaged leg. "A blood-blade's wrath will counteract ten-fold," the words from Queen Davina's personal sword-smith clanged through his head, "When used against its own blood, the thief-wielder should beware."

A slice like the one she had inflicted on his thigh should have rid her of her own leg, at the very least.

Slowly, head whirling as quickly as his thoughts, he eased off her. But his gaze refused to leave her flushed face. "My blade—" his tone sounded numb— "it didn't hurt you?"

"No," she said, not understanding, "because I was the one who wielded it before you kicked it halfway back to Halorium, it seems. Are you going mad, Stick-Arse?"

A soft breeze kissed Matthias's brow; however, it did little to ease his rapid pulse. He sought out the blood-blade, still stained with both of their blood, like the rubies rumored to fall from the God of Fire's tears, but—

How?

He wondered what his expression looked like to warrant such a rare look of concern from her. "I held the blade," Abel said again in a careful tone. "I hurt you. I mean, your sword did cut my wrist when you flailed and fell like a graceless log, but it's barely a scratch."

Matthias struggled to his feet. "You're fine," he repeated. "I don't understand."

The wind swept back his hair; it had grown far too long these past few months. Branches swayed and carried their words, whispering against his skin.

My children.

Eleanora's voice on the breeze rang a shiver down his spine. A pleasant one. A voice he had not heard since before the Purge had destroyed the land of his kin. Since the threat had forced his  mother to send him and his sister into hiding in another realm entirely and herself into a blasted tree.

Do not fear, child.

"You hear it, too?" Abel stiffened beneath him, her gaze wide as she registered the tightness of his spooled anxiety. Those eyes. Seeing them here, they awoke something within him. She sat up on her elbows. "Your...mother?"

My children.

Curtly, Matthias nodded and sat back on his heels, kneeling in front of her. "She has accepted your presence."

Maybe his injured thigh was losing too much blood because he couldn't stop looking at her. The symmetry of her finely-boned face, the almond-shape to her eyes, gleaming like the realm's most perfectly golden acorn. A cold sweat of familiarity doused over him.

He should probably see a healer.

"Hey!" Her voice forced his eyes to open. "Stay with me, Stick-Arse." The sound of fabric being torn burst harshly into Matthias's ringing head. Abel ripped his pant leg into two with the tip of her arrow, revealing the jagged wound. "I still have so many questions."

Really, he was fine.

Her eyebrows pinched in the middle of her forehead like she had heard his thoughts and hardly believed them. They were shaped like his own, arched in the same place, but finer. More feminine. When she snapped her fingers, he jolted.

"Make yourself useful, arsehole, and hand me your tunic!"

Nairol's smirk was not the last image Matthias wished to take with him into unconsciousness. But there he was, standing over Abel, his expression unworried. Perhaps even slightly bemused as he shucked out of his tunic and handed it over to Abel without any insecurity over how much golden skin he now had on display.

Matthias had always known Abel held the will to bend even the haughtiest of elven males.

"He will live," Nairol said, squatting at Abel's hip. Matthias was not yet far enough gone to miss Nairol's utter disregard at offering Abel aid even as she struggled to tighten his own tunic around Matthias's pulsing thigh. Prick. "Besides—" Had Nairol's voice always been so irritating when they had been children?—"it was only some harmless sibling rivalry. Hardly a war-inflicted injury."

"Nairol!" Araric's voice grumbled. "Heed your silence."

"Cursed elves." Abel's fingers fumbled over the knot she had tied. "Piss off," she told Nairol, "you clearly aren't helping."

And she was right, in a way, but also so impossibly wrong. Because, of course, she would not have taken Nairol's comment literally; she most likely believed Nairol had only spoken in thou-art-holier-than-I elvish speak for the way all elvish folk are general kin, but—sibling rivalry, Nairol had claimed.

Holy Goddess Elayn.

Shit. No. 

It wasn't blood loss that caused Matthias's limbs to grow faint, caused his head to spin, and skin to break out in sticky sweats; after all, he had sustained far worse wounds to get appointed as captain of Queen Davina's guard. No; not blood loss. Shock. It was utter shock that held him hostage as securely as the Willow's roots. An all consuming shock that knocked the air from his lungs until his organs shriveled, withering his soul away until he felt no older than the child he had been when Eleanora had forced him and his barely days old sister through the swirling chaos of that portal. The screams that had torn from his throat, the grip he had not been strong enough to maintain on the precious bundle in his arms, the only family he had left...

And her eyes. Gods. He knew where they had come from.

They were his mother's.

Their mother's.

"The blood-blade." The words stumbled from his numb lips. Her hands propped him up, supporting his shoulders, but she had been so small, so helpless. He thought she had died. "It makes sense now."

Abel quirked an expression, similar to the one Eleanora would often give to him after he had returned home with skinned elbows and knees from the Earthen Elementi training he had so often snuck into as an innocent child.

Bless the Goddess.

How had he not seen the resemblance before?

"Blood of thine blood."

"By the Scribes," Abel said. "He's growing delusional. Help me with the oaf, won't you?"

Nairol sighed but hoisted Matthias under the opposite arm as he and Abel helped him to his feet. "Always the dramatist," Nairol admonished. "Come on, Ti-Ti. I promised Eleanora I would leave you in one piece upon your return.

"Dramatist?" Abel asked. "Ti-Ti?"

"I loathe you." Matthias tried to shrug out from under Nairol's grasp but the elf was resolute. It didn't help that his reproach had come out in a haze of stupor. "I can walk."

"Sure you can, Ti-Ti," Abel mocked, and Matthias knew what he would see if he were to look at her. 

The amused smirk that would flip the corners of her lips, pop out the dimple on the left side of her cheek just like he remembered Eleanora's. That motherly smile as Eleanora had listened to his outlandish, childish stories, had wiped the soil from his brow after he had attempted to manipulate Earths' threads before he had been strong enough.

His heart ached. 

Abel held not one of those shared memories.

It would remain so.

For the protection of Galandreal, his once lost realm that he had found again, Matthias forced the knowledge to the depths of his brain. 

Until his task was completed. 

Until the Black Quill was in Queen Branwyn's hands and the elements of the realms had been restored.

Until the time of Authors came to an end.

But it didn't stop him from allowing Abel to support him as they walked through Elder's Willow together, soaking in the vitality of her, the staggering miracle of her waltzing right back into his life where she should have remained. Where he could have protected her and raised her in the knowledge of their lands and people.

So, yes, he would allow himself to drown in these emotions while he had the excuse of his injured leg before his duty swallowed him whole once more. 

_ _ _

GASP. 

DOUBLE GASP. 

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